The first-time buyers' allowance is "madness, wasteful and inequitable" according to Independent TD Stephen Donnelly.

"It's bizzare. It makes the situation worse for everybody. House prices will go up very quickly," Mr Donnelly told Newstalk.

"If you’re a first-time buyer and you can get in very quickly to buy one of these houses and then you can get your €20,000 tax rebate over a number of years, you’ll be a little bit better off for a while but for most first-time buyers you wont be because the house prices will go up by that amount very quickly.

"For everyone else it makes the situation worse. For the negative equity generation who have been ignored since the start it makes their situation worse."

Mr Donnelly said he "nearly fell off his chair" when he heard about Noonan's housing plan.

"Everyone who studies economics at Leaving Cert knows that if you have a supply-side problem, you don’t fix it by increasing demand. You fix it by sorting out supply. You provide serious investment for building."

He also praised Katherine Zappone's childcare plan as he said we have one of the "highest costs of childcare in the world".

"The old system stops people going back to work or planning for their future. It’s a first step. It could never be everything. There is money going to the childcare providers because they need money to invest in their staff. While it’s only Tulsa it’s a start.

"In an ideal world where there was a lot of money you’d give help to all childcare providers. You don’t want to discriminate between people who mind their kids at home or those who go to work in terms of support from the state. But that’s not the problem we’re trying to solve at the moment. We’re trying to solve problem of parents who are at work who have no money in their pockets because their wages are on childcare or people who are in a poverty trap because they can’t afford to go back to work and pay for childcare."